Sorry it’s been taking so long, but I’ve not been feeling too well. I was worthless all weekend and today it’s hard just to sit up to my computer. Even so I’ve gotten the final rendering of the background shot done. You may have to refresh your browser to see it. It was textured and rendered in Carrara 5 and I’m pretty happy with the results. It’s the fastest rendering engine I’ve seen. It only took two hours and forty-five minutes to render and that’s at a huge size with global illumination and HDRI. Incidentally, HDRI uses special photos to light a scene. It gives some of the best lighting results but is the biggest render hog of them all. So for Carrara to do such a nice job in such a short time is pretty impressive. And for those of you who are thinking of trying your hand at 3d but have a budget, Daz3d has Carrara 5 on sale for 65% off right now, plus a free upgrade to version 6 when it comes out. It’s not a bad deal. I don’t really like Carrara’s modeling abilities too much, but that’s what Hexagon is really good at anyway.
I was going to try to UV map the thing and paint it in the Deep Paint Demo and Photoshop, but I decided that would take too long for a background scene. I’ll try it for a space ship I need to do, hopefully. I’ll try to get the rest of the page done by Friday if I can but I’ve not been feeling too great, as I said. It’s been hard to get anything done. Still, at least this is progress. Next I have to pose and position characters into this scene. Basically I’ll just take Poser characters and import them into Carrara to position them and then do a simple quick render with them in place. That will give me a reference picture with the size and perspective of the characters in the scene and I’ll just rotoscope (i.e. trace) over that when drawing the final characters. It’s really the best and most accurate way of integrating 2d characters into a 3d setting like this.
The scene itself still needs some post-processing work in Photoshop. The signs, little details in the shop, adjustments to the lighting and color and so forth. I know it seems like a lot of trouble for one shot but it’ll appear again a bit later so it’s nice to be able to reposition the camera and do a couple new shots of it. I don’t think I’ve spent more than seven or eight hours on it so far, and that was with learning the new software. If I had hand-drawn and colored it, the thing would have taken at least six or seven hours to do and then I’d have to draw it again when it appears later on. So the 3d approach isn’t necessarily more work. I think it depends on the situation. Anyway, I’m feeling pretty wiped out. So until later.
